Rush for migrant aid highlights Obama's delays

In seeking emergency money from Congress now, the White House is paying a heavy price for having waited so long in response to the flood of unaccompanied children from Central America crossing the southwest border.

There’s anecdotal evidence that the tide is ebbing as efforts are made to intercept the young migrants crossing Mexico. As many as six deportation buses a day are now arriving in El Salvador from Mexico — a big increase over this spring. At the same time, the daily rate of unaccompanied children apprehended at the U.S. border has dropped significantly from what it was in late June and early July.

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But as early as March, Democrats pressed the White House to be more forthright about the crisis. And the failure to do so shows a lack of political will by President Barack Obama, critics say, and second, a troubling failure in U.S. intelligence.

Perhaps most striking, the delay testifies to the real human costs that result from what’s become a destructive alienation between the executive branch and an often dysfunctional Congress.

Not so long ago in this city, it would be easy to imagine the White House and the Appropriations committees setting to work early this spring to find the resources to deal with the crisis. Instead, the picture now is of thousands of children — whose own governments have failed to protect them at home — being caught up in an immigration debate which has so spooked Washington that it has trouble seeing the young faces before it.

This modern children’s march at the border is not new. Twice before, in 2012 and again last January, the House and Senate Appropriations leadership quietly stepped in to add money to deal with the young migrants. But to the surprise of many, Obama failed to build on this base in his March budget even as the trip flares kept going off in the Rio Grande Valley.

In testimony last week, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson conceded that there were warning signs in January that had grown only worse by March and April.

“It really spiked rather dramatically, beginning in January and then most notably in the period of March-April,” Johnson said. Border patrol reports for the Rio Grande Valley sector — which has been the nerve center for the crisis — best illustrate this.

In the first quarter of fiscal 2014, the number of unaccompanied children apprehended jumped to 8,297 — a pace far in excess of the same period one year before in fiscal 2013. The second quarter 2014 numbers had jumped again to 10,984 by the end of March, a 32 percent increase over the first quarter and bringing the 2014 total to 19,281.

What followed in the third quarter was a genuine explosion. By the end of June, the number of children apprehended in the Rio Grande sector had reached 42,164, which means the total for 2014 had doubled in the space of just three months.

This surge forced the president’s hand last week, and Obama is seeking $3.73 billion in new emergency funds to get through the last months of fiscal 2014 and begin to fill the holes in his 2015 budget. The administration also ramped up its projections to say that up to 90,000 unaccompanied children could be apprehended for the entire southwest border by the end of September — about 70,000 of them from Central America.

But given the early warning signs and the fact that the U.S. was already tracking the criminal smuggling networks bringing the children to the border, should the third-quarter surge have been such a surprise?

“I think that’s a fair question,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) in an interview. And much as he is sympathetic to the administration’s situation, Reed pressed Johnson last week on whether he had adequate intelligence resources to track and combat these operations.

“These children are getting here because it’s a business,” Reed said. “Pretty hard-nosed people, we have to take them out of business.”

March, the last month of the second quarter, was pivotal on several fronts.

Led by the Rio Grande sector, the number of unaccompanied children apprehended along the entire southwest border jumped to 7,196 — an almost 50 percent increase over February, which was itself already 60 percent higher than February 2013.

Weeks later, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), a former Baltimore social worker, forced an April 22 meeting of top staff from the White House budget office and four major line departments: State, Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services. And it was then that the administration acknowledged that the flow of migrant children could double again in 2015 and the president’s budget was inadequate.